ILX Parenting 5: I'm a big kid now

Aww. I think that happens to all dads? That's how Dad becomes the one who, yes, holds your screaming head in the sink to wash away enough blood to tell if you have to go to the hospital for stitches.

― Tottenham Heelspur (in orbit), Sunday, September 15, 2013 10:43 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Anecdotally, yes, it seems like dads make more of these mistakes or are more lax or something. OTOH, while H was home with K for a year and a half, I used to joke that it was like the saying about "I'm a great driver when I'm alone in the car"

I didn't mean bad things happen more with dads! I meant, the necessity of steeling yrself to do the hard/gross thing when it's your kid, it just becomes reality.

yea any time i have to forcibly restrain J to change a diaper, remove boogers, wipe his face/hands, i feel like an asshole. especially when he breaks down and does that horrible, totally defeated cry

it's really bad giving him medicine too, he hates that. he had a double ear infection a month ago and giving him amoxcillin 2x a day was just torture for him

I had my very first run in with the in-laws this week. PP's parents are divorced and the dad and step dad have a 30 year active feud going on. It was grandparents day at school last Thursday and they came dangerously close to using beeps as a pawn in their rivalry. On the weekend I let one of them have it. Probably my proudest mama lion moment to date.

K has had severe diarrhea a couple of times and completely refused pedialyte. We had to force her to drink a whole bunch of it, which was an awful experience. But the importance/good of what you're doing is far outweighed by the temporary misery you're putting them in.

xpost - Beeps is disturbing delighted when she gets to take medicine

xp, oh man, dealing with a feuding grandpa and step-grandpa does not sound cool at all

Probably my proudest mama lion moment to date.

Good on ya, sunny.

^^ otm

Beeps is disturbing delighted when she gets to take medicine

The something not falling far from the something here.

Heh. Abba saw me pour a glass of vodka this weekend, and I called it a "grown-up drink". She countered "No. Medicine!"

laurel otm. multiple generations of apples and trees, including me, unfortunately, but i have my eyes open at least.

Calling... so... many... daycare... providers...

I'm usually aces at talking to people on the phone but this is just exhausting me.

Probably because I know the end result will be handing my infant and a whole lot of money over to someone else for 8 hours/day.

The one I just called costs more than my salary but they offer yoga for babies, so I guess that's worth it.

This won't make you feel better, but we're having a tough time with the issue as H has started work again. My mother-in-law can do a couple days a week, which is great, and we realized we could do a part-time nanny for the same price as daycare, so that's what we're doing. We did a trial period of a couple months with one, and she was sorta ok, like not someone who would hit our child or ever put her in danger, but K also just didn't seem to like her much. Then this woman who lives in the building finished a job watching some other kids who she had taken care of for several years and seemed perfect -- we already had talked to her a bunch of times and she loves K, she speaks K's other language (hebrew), she only wanted part-time work so we didn't have to worry about her leaving us for someone offering full-time, and K just seemed to have a rapport with her.

First day, K has a bad fall at the playground in her care. Some nanny who is friends with the old nanny claims to have seen the new nanny at the park not paying attention and sitting on the bench (you really can't sit on the bench while an 18-month-old is running around, you have to be after them all the time). Obviously the woman who called us has an interest in getting her friend her job back, but it also seemed like it matched up with other details we knew. Could be an exaggerated version of events, but still, I am NOT cool with someone sitting on a bench while K runs around the playground unattended, even for a few mins.

That's scary. What are you going to do?

I am cautiously optimistic. There are a couple of close home daycares and a few centers that are one bus away that are (comparatively) affordable and have availability, but that's just the first step. Then we have to take tours, etc. It's just such a headache.

I spend a lot of time being impotently angry at the shitty state of the USA's leave laws and wishing I lived somewhere that mandates a year of paid maternity leave.

In seriousness, I think we're going to have people we know spy on the nanny at the park. If it's not working out, we'll have to find someone else I guess. We also firmly told the nanny that she needs to stay on top of K, giving her the benefit of the doubt that maybe since she hadn't worked with a toddler in a while she had forgotten.

There's an argument to be made that daycare is actually better in some ways -- more layers of supervision/licensing/professionalization as opposed to just your kid alone with a random. K is still too young for most of the good daycares around us anyway, and she's also a little physically weak for her age, but when she turns two we may just put her in daycare.

how old is K? we started D in a local Chabad montessori program when she was 15 months and we've been really happy

That sounds like a good plan w/ the nanny. And arguments for and against nannies/daycare aside, you've got to do what's best for your kid, at least to the extent that you're able.

xp 18 mos. There were only two daycares available that had a pre-2 class, one was in another neighborhood I'd have to drive her to before taking the train to work, and the other we just got a bad feeling from. When she turns two there are a lot more good options.

The woman watching her now I think is genuinely nice and likes K but is a little old and maybe tired, bad knees etc., and also has a more hands off attitude.

ha the place I just called played Vivaldi as the hold music while they transferred me to their "admissions coordinator." Something tells me that's not going to be in our price range...

It's really crazy how much of a normal salary you wind up having to spend on daycare -- with my wife as a teacher we were just barely in the zone where it made financial sense for her to go back to work.

It didn't make financial sense for my wife to go back to work when we lived in Silicon Valley or when we lived in the Great Plains, since daycare was in$ane on the Peninsula and salaries were lol in the Great Planes. and we both have PhDs! what a country!

we don't do daycare, doesn't make financial sense and it would be a second choice anyway. we actually feel pretty lucky that it doesn't make financial sense, we love that one of us is home with J. i work full-time and my wife works part-time, so she has him most of the time and i take over when she's at work. J's almost a year now and we're definitely going to keep this arrangement if/when we have more kids (which we're hoping to). definitely one of the best choices we've made, but i realize that it's a different choice for everyone.

Ugh, K freaked out when new nanny showed up today, and we've now caught both old nanny and new nanny in at least one lie. It's hard to be at work today.

a LIE? what sort of lie?

Well to be clear we're not entirely sure the new nanny lied, but her description of how the fall happened seemed a little off, and we don't really believe her that she wasn't sitting on the bench at all. When H talked to the old nanny, she pretended like she wasn't aware of what her friend had told us about, and said that she hadn't even talked to her friend, but this was obviously a lie, because her friend told us that the old nanny wanted the job back, so they must have talked.

Nannygate!

you guys need an army of those teddy bear camera things

carl what kind of fees are they talking about?

Like how much does it cost? The most expensive one was about $2,500/ month (not actually more than I make but enough to make not working a serious alternative). Cheapest runs ~ $850/month. They all require a bus or train or walking > half mile but what can you do. The home daycare a couple blocks away hasn't returned any of my messages, which I'm taking as a sign.

Yeah I think we were looking at $1000-1500/month for the nearest daycares (the cheapest of which would be a huge pain since it would mean driving in the other direction before taking a train to work). At that point it made just as much sense to have a 3x week nanny, and since K is a little physically behind kids her age, we didn't think she'd do so great in daycare yet.

we pay $180 a week but it's half as expensive as every other day care in our neighborhood

That's infant pricing, too. It will get cheaper at 15 months, I think.

n/a I wish your daycare took infants and also that our city hadn't torpedoed the Lincoln bus. Evie could have a tiny buddy in daycare with her.

The prices I quoted are considered cheap for NYC (it's Queens) -- in Manhattan you could easily pay $2000/month or more.

If $850 is the cheap end, how do low income families cope?? I don't know what prices are like where we live but $850 would mean I'd def have to quit work.

I honestly have no fucking idea. H and I have what I think by most standards would be considered good jobs, and it's still a strain. I guess some people rely on grandparents and such, but if you can't do that it's pretty hard.

i think everyone posting prices is in big cities, so i'm sure it's cheaper in the burbs or rural areas. but yeah it's a problem. there are cheaper options but i think a lot of people rely on family or rearranging schedules to make things work. people say having a kid is expensive but in our experience the cost wasn't so much having to spend money on evie but in losing income while my wife stayed home for two+ years. i'm glad she did it but our budget was very tight during that time, we basically had no disposable income.

$850 is a price for the Lakeview neighborhood. I'm sure it's cheaper in other neighborhoods in Chicago, probably considerably. We just aren't convenient them them. We're surrounded by well off white people, so those are the prices we have to pay.

Maybe in the poorer neighborhoods you're more likely to have family living close by (total guess, no stats to back this up), so daycare has to be more competitively priced. Where I live your most likely to have moved here from another state or your family lives in the burbs.

No, man, $850/month is the price west on Diversey in Logan Square. Lakeview is low to mid $1000s.

j, there are places that offer subsidized pricing and or are specifically for low-income families. It's still too expensive for a lot of incomes, though. I have a friend who takes her kids to an unlicensed home daycare that her neighbor runs (unlicensed = cheap), and some people make do with an ultimately unreliable amalgam of neighbors, family, and friends. It's not a good situation.

Oh hey what n/a said.

yeah we live in an expensive area and we don't have any family here, no close friends who could provide day care. i earn so little and hate my job so much that if we were to have kids i'd probably be caring for them full time till they went to school. which sounds terrifying tbh.

I would be into not working for six months or maybe a year, but after that I'd lose my mind.

I had no idea day care cost that much, that's a mortgage note! Do any of you guys let your children watch television or movies/cartoons? If so how much? We've been letting August watch this channel called Baby's First. Only a little in the morning while T. cooks breakfast and I sit with her and we sing along and dance. She'll sometimes watch our shows with us, but it doesn't hold her attention much. Sometimes when she's sleepy but refuses to lay down, we'll watch a cartoon with her, like Finding Nemo or Toy Story and she'll allow herself to be sleepy and falls asleep. But, I keep reading in books that any television is bad for babies. I recently read that it alters their brain development that leads to a lack of attention when they are older.

We watch TV every day. Mostly it's just when winding down for the night or when taking a break after playing hard outside. A lot of other parents think we're basically the devil though. : D

I dunno, I'm frequently astonished at how successfully the best telly or e.g. Pixar captures kids' attention completely. I can't believe it's bad if they're getting that much out of it. Plus they learn loads from something like octonauts. But it's not like we let them watch twelve hours a day anyway, I doubt these scare studies are aimed at us.

We let K watch approximately 20-30 minutes of Baby Einstein videos on the computer every day -- usually in the morning when one of us is gone and the other one needs to shower, or sometimes in the evening if one of us is doing cooking that requires attention and the other isn't home. Yes, we're using it as a babysitter, no doubt, and it's an invaluable one. The Baby Einstein videos, for all the knocking they've taken, are very slow and calm don't have the kinds of fast cuts/edits that one would imagine messing with a baby's attention span. And she's actually learned a lot of words from them.

I don't even watch TV every day myself, but my hope is just to raise K with a healthy, moderated attitude about it and other forms of entertainment, rather than treating it like some kind of demon.